Enrollment firm offers ideas

Projections on target for 2013

STERLING -- With enrollment down about 12 percent this year, Northeastern Junior College is looking at how they can change in the coming years.

In January, the CEO of Noel-Levitz, an enrollment firm that helps colleges across the country with enrollment, visited the campus to see what they're doing and make some recommendations about how they might improve enrollment.

Andy Long, dean of enrollment at NJC, shared what they learned from the firm during an NJC Advisory Council meeting on Thursday.

One of the things they found is that while NJC was the fastest growing rural college in the state from annual year 2007 to annual year 2011, with about 30 percent growth in terms of full-time equivalent (FTE) students, the number of actual students attending decreased.

"Basically our growth, a lot of the growth came from full-time student population. We had fewer students but they

were taking more credit hours, more full-time students," Long said.

Prior to NJC contacting them, the firm had already done some future projections for the college as part of the projections the Colorado Department of Higher Education asked them to do for colleges all across the state. Based on those projections NJC is about where Noel-Levtiz expected them to be in 2013, based on demographics and past enrollment trends.

Future projections show the college may not experience much growth in the next three or four years in terms of new freshman.

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According to the projections there will be 362 new freshmen in 2013, 360 in 2014 and 363 in 2015, but by 2021 there could be 407 new freshmen.

"Even though demographics say we should stay the same for the next three or four years, we know we have the campus and the people that that doesn't have to be where we're at," Long said.

Noel-Levitz gave NJC 50 recommendations in five categories to help improve enrollment.

The first is to align marketing to prospective students.

"They said you've got to find more prospects before you go on the road," Long said. "Get those names and start marketing to those people, then when you travel you aren't starting with a blank slate, they've already heard of you. Then it kind of opens the door to taking that next step, from a prospect to an admitted student; from an admitted student to a registered student."

The firm's second recommendation is to increase follow-up with prospective students and admitted students.

NJC's number of admitted students for 2012 was 1,642; however, enrollment was only 441, for a yield of about 26.9 percent.

"That is a very low yield. So we found out that we spend all our time prospecting, when we ought to spend our time going from prospecting to closing," Long said. "Instead of sending everybody out across the state traveling to find prospects, we're setting out across the state to build relationships with people who've already heard about us."

The firm suggested they follow up with phone calls, send more mailings to admitted students and have a more in-depth email campaign.

Those two recommendations might mean adding positions to the enrollment/recruitment office and the marketing office.

Additionally, the firm suggested using scholarships and tuition rates to attract students who wouldn't attend.

"They said from the outside looking in, the Hope Scholarship is complicated and it is," Long said.

There are a lot of things that affect the scholarship, including whether or not the student gets a state grant and tuition. NJC has to wait to send award letters to those who receive the scholarships until after tuition numbers have been finalized, which doesn't happen until late spring.

Noel-Levitiz suggested simplifying the scholarship.

"You just call it the Northeastern Guarantee and we're going to take our area students and if you have a 2.5 GPA, we can give you basically two years for the price of one in terms of tuition," Long said. "It's either going to be coming through grants or this Hope Scholarship, but we'll give you two for one. Then change it so we're awarding the cash amount, so we don't have to wait until tuition's figured out to do that."

Advisory Council members Rich O'Connell and Carol Kiel expressed concern about changing the name of the Hope Scholarship, because that's what the community knows it by.

"I think we can go with a combination, or we can somehow include that the Hope Scholarship is now more of a guarantee for students that fall under that criteria," said NJC President Jay Lee.

The college is also looking at its Vision Scholarship, for students outside NJC's service area, and changing the required grade point average.

Another recommendation the firm had is to assign ownership of retention.

Currently there are not clear retention goals on campus. Someone needs to be assigned the responsibility for retention, and then there should be clear goals and strategies aimed to help all of campus to reach those goals, the recommendation stated.

The firm's final recommendation is to use research more to assist in enrollment goals.

Research should be used to help identify students that are not attending, to see where they are going. It should also be used to identify how NJC is losing students and identify ways to keep them.

The challenge to addressing all of the recommendations will be time and resources.

"Everybody around this campus is working pretty hard so we've got to figure out where do we want to spend our money, where do we want to spend our time," Long said.

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